On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 8:41 PM, William A. Rowe Jr. <wr...@apache.org>wrote:
> On 3/22/2011 10:24 PM, Keith Curtis wrote: > > > > I try to be pragmatic as well but free software is better and cheaper and > so these worthy > > goals and reasons should be reflected in the policies on a topic. > > "the policies", hmmm. Those would be 'your policies'. These aren't my policies, they are my suggestion for policies. This started as a request for feedback. Which may or may not > be what Marvin is attempting to compose. Your form of evangelism could be > counterproductive to the audience who Marvin is addressing. I cannot have the context to speak in the way his audience would require. I barely have enough context to speak to you all. He would be responsible to translate this idea into a way that will be acceptable to others if he wanted to. > Unless you are > prepared to show data on "better" as well as "cheaper", this is all a very > hollow statement. > This is the sort of data that can be put into a policy document. There are many examples of how free software is better and that ASF surely has case studies. > > You are certainly welcome at the ASF no matter if you have a FLOSS-centric > or OSS-centric approach to source code, but enough proselytizing already. > community@ is a gathering of minds, not a divisive exclusionary zone :) > I'm just stating ideas for you to consider. It is possible for ASF to become more relevant to the Linux desktop and average web programmers. When I look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apache_Software_Foundation_Projects I see a scary amount of Java. You may think that big goals are exclusionary, but they can rally people, and lead to big results. One of the biggest potential for ASF is Strong AI and so if I could prioritize, it would be for Apache UIMA, Lucene, etc. to join the Python community. http://scikit-learn.sourceforge.net/ I'm not sure where I should go to offer that advice / defend that idea ;-) Regards, -Keith
